HTML Code Rendered Instantly Before Your Eyes, As You Type   - 1,733 Views, 1 Comment

The problem is most often that the sender has not properly embedded in their outgoing email the “Content-Type: text/plain” or “Content-Type: text/html” indicator in their email headers. This header tells your email reader whether the content of the email you are receiving - the text in the body - is plain text or html. If the header says “Content-Type: text/html” your email reader knows to convert the html code into text with pretty html formatting. But if the header says “Content-Type: text/plain”, but the content really contains html, your email reader, if it actually pays attention to that header, will show all the html code as if it were just plain text full of “>”s and “< "s and everything in between, making the email unreadable.

Up until now you had few choices with this problem child email. You could squint and try to make out the actual text among all the html code. Or, if you have access to your own web server, you could copy the email, edit it into an html file on your server, then determine a URL for that file, and point your web browser to it. What a pain.

Now, however, Jesse Ruderman has put the coolest tool up on his website at SquareFree.com. Oh, he didn’t intend it to help with this problem, I’m sure, but he has come to my rescue just the same.

Jesse’s tool allows you to type html code in an input area on the top half of his web page, and it renders what you type as it would look to someone viewing that code with a web browser in the bottom half of the page, in real time.

That means that now I can take that problem email, copy it into the top half of Jesse’s page, and voila! Instantly that email is magically transformed from gobbledygook code to something readable.

Jesse, thank you.

So go ahead and check out Jesse Ruderman’s HtmlEdit page at SquareFree.com.